The present invention relates in general to data processing, and in particular, to decreasing data access latency in a data processing system by prefetching data from system memory.
Prefetching refers to speculatively accessing data in advance of need by a processing element from a higher latency memory (e.g., system memory or lower level cache) and holding the data in a lower latency memory (e.g., a higher level cache). If the data is subsequently accessed by a demand request of the processing element prior to eviction of the data from the lower latency memory, the access latency experienced by the processing element is reduced.